US to send 200 troops to Nigeria to train army

What happened

The Trump administration is sending about 200 troops to Nigeria to help train its military to fight Islamist militants, U.S. and Nigerian officials said Tuesday.

The deployment comes weeks after President Donald Trump accused Nigeria’s government of failing to protect Christians from terrorist attacks in the West African country.

Who said what

The “fresh U.S. forces” will “supplement a handful of U.S. military personnel already in Nigeria” to help local military units “identify targets for military strikes,” The Wall Street Journal said. Trump late last year threatened to send in U.S. troops “guns-a-blazing” to avenge what he called a “Christian genocide.” But in this deployment, “U.S. troops aren’t going to be involved in direct combat or operations,” Nigerian military spokesperson Maj. Gen. Samaila Uba told the Journal.

This “startling turn” in U.S.-Nigerian relations follows an “intense, yearslong push led by Christian activists, Republican lawmakers and American celebrities seeking U.S. intervention” in Nigeria’s “long-simmering security crisis,” The New York Times said. Nigeria rejected Trump’s claim that it has failed to protect Christians, but “U.S. military leaders who for years have complained about prickly relations with the Nigerian military say the shift has opened the door to increased intelligence sharing and military planning.”

What next?

The new U.S. forces are “expected to arrive in Nigeria over the coming weeks,” the Journal said. “Just how effective the increased U.S. involvement in Nigeria has been or will be is an open question,” the Times said. A salvo of U.S. “Tomahawk missiles fired on Dec. 25, valued at about $32 million,” landed in “overwhelmingly Muslim” northwest Nigeria, but mostly “hit empty fields and vacant militant hide-outs,” according to residents.